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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
You say that "The great depression was caused by the central bank along with the monetary policies of the central government," but I took pains to state that in my view this is a red herring, and that cycles of boom and bust would occur even if there was no fiat money at all, but only gold, silver, and copper, exchanging at their naturally-arrived-at market values. I said that this was because of the inherent instability of the mechanism within the investment market that allocates a proportion of production to producer goods, which will be used to produce the next cycle of consumer goods, and I cited Keynes as confirming this view. I also mentioned that the theory that monetary policy is the cause of cyclical instabilities in capitalism is one of the foundations of political anti-Semitism.
On a lighter note, I spent the last hour trying to corroborate a story I found on Hezbollah's english-language website, according to which a dissident Israeli professor had just exposed a narrowly aborted Mossad plot to blow Lebanese General Michel Aoun's head off, using a booby-trapped camera, Ahmed Shah Massoud style. It turned out to be an utter fabrication, so it appeared on my blog for about an hour and then I removed it, feeling a bit silly. I suppose this is what comes of reading Kansas O'Flaherty comics.
I bet most people think the war was supposed to make oil cheaper. Well, apparently not. I am convinced by these two guys, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, who have been arguing for a decade or two that the aim of the war party is actually to make the stuff more expensive:
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/
A cynic might wonder whether their own secret intention might be to get Israel off the hook, since, after "war for oil", the next most popular theory is "war for Israel", and in fact somewhere in there also is a free full-length downloadable book about the Israeli economy, which discusses the baleful economic and social effects of militarisation there, which are similar to those in the USA, or, if possible, even worse. They are friends with Doug Henwood, who edits the 'Left Business Observer' and who also has a handy, non-technical, free downloadable book, about Wall Street and its infamous investment bankers, on his site:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/
I mention all this, which is, in social science terms, based on Thorstein Veblen style institutional analysis, to offer a more detailed alternative to the Misesians on the one hand and the Marxians on the other. I hope it helps - as I said, it's all free.
It struck me, thinking back over this threadful of comments overnight, that if I was involved in psychological warfare, my maxim would be, try to re-arouse the emotions that your audience learned to feel during childhood. This will make it harder for them to think rationally. I think this may explain why there is so much low-level propaganda floating about that boils down to encouraging Americans to imagine that the war of independence against Britain only ever appeared to have been won over two hundred years ago, and that in reality Britain has secretly maintained some sort of occult hegemony over the USA ever since, or that it is trying to re-impose such a rule today. Baldie McEagle started me thinking this way when he said that what I called "hyper-individualism" is very deeply inculcated and is rather omnipresent culturally - he seemed to stress the emotional intensity of it. Now, the demand to re-fight the war of independence against Britain is quite widespread in the conspirological subculture at the moment, coming from people as diverse as Alex Jones and Lyndon Larouche. It can be keyed into other themes, like the Jewish bankers one, for instance, or the 9-11 conspiracy one. There are some conspirologists who point out the role Britain had in Cromer's day in fostering the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for instance. Apologies that all this is so off-topic, but it seems to me to be relevant across the board when thinking about US ideologies of crisis, and having presented it once, I won't have to present it again on other threads.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
